19th January

More drawing from life, this time the skeins and ball of yarn on my desk. I almost always have some knitting on my desk because I knit whilst listening to podcasts or music. I knit most days and always have something on the needles (usually two or three things).

Drawing from life is something that I've only recently come back to. Like most artists I started out with drawing and I was largely self taught. I'd enjoyed art as a kid but became convinced in secondary school that I was 'no good at drawing'.

At the age of 18 I had been chucked off an English degree after only a year (I failed all my exams in spectacular style after spending the whole year partying hard!). So I was back home living with my parents, working in a hospital as a medical technician, a bit depressed and bored out of my mind. I knew I needed some kind of creative outlet and so I took up drawing again, probably because it was something small, cheap and portable.

I quickly became hooked and kept myself sane by drawing in my lunch breaks and in the evenings. I moved down to Oxford to another hospital job and started taking life classes. My job became more and more unbearable to me: I was living for the evenings and weekends when I could make art. Eventually I got a portfolio together, applied to several art colleges and was accepted at Cumbria College of Art to do a Foundation course.

There was a lot of drawing on Foundation but slowly my need to draw from life fell away. I've never stopped drawing completely - even in the years when I was drawing very little I still sketched out rough ideas for sculptures in my notebooks - but I stopped drawing from life almost entirely, preferring the quickness of taking photographs. So it was quite a surprise when a couple of months ago I suddenly started drawing from life in my moleskine notebook. I haven't done a lot of it since then, but it's kind of nice to feel that maybe I have come full circle in my drawing education. I certainly feel as though I am still a beginner at drawing and probably always will!

Posted: 10.20pm on 19.1.07
Returned: 22.1.07